CLARE, John.

£7,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Village Minstrel, and other poems. By the Northamptonshire peasant. Presentation copy of the second edition, inscribed by the poet on the half-title of the first volume, "To his Friend Willm Hilton Esq. with the Authors kindest remembrances, March 26, 1828". Hilton painted Clare's most famous portrait, posing him in a brown coat and yellow-gold silk neckerchief. Now in the National Portrait Gallery, the ethereal portrait is the most reproduced likeness of Clare and formed the basis for the frontispiece to the present work.Clare and Hilton (1786-1839) were introduced by the poet's publisher John Taylor in 1820. Clare sat for Hilton that year. "Hilton's painting is the iconic image of Clare in his prime. There is a visionary gleam in the poet's piercing blue eyes. His light-brown hair is unkempt, his cheeks flushed, lips parted as if about to breathe out some exquisite line of verse. He looks hot and uncomfortable in wing-collar, carefully folded neckerchief and tightly buttoned yellow waistcoat" (Bate, p. 168). The two men remained friends until Clare's asylum years: in 1837, in his last letter to Taylor, Clare wrote that "I should like to see Hilton and Cary".Elected to the Royal Academy in 1819, Hilton is also noted for grand manner history paintings and his 1822 portrait of John Keats, likely commissioned by Taylor who published an edition of Keats's poems that year (the portrait is now, like Clare's, in the National Portrait Gallery).

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.